The Future of Obsidian Plugins

One of the things that's held me back (aside from the huge time commitment) is my fear that people will come to depend on that review process, such that if the process misses an obfuscated exploit the project itself will be blamed for the subsequent attacks.

How are you thinking about that?

To me it feels like the difference between the Debian/Ubuntu approach - everything in their registry is tightly reviewed - and the PyPI/npm approach where there's no review guarantees at all.

For instance, an AI summarization plugin that starts by saying it accesses url="api.openai.com"+path with a user-supplied OpenAI key is going to be incredibly common - and I'm really excited for what the community builds here!

But what if that plugin has an update that allows the "user" to choose an arbitrary endpoint as an OpenAI-compatible API - how do you ensure that's not a malicious update that has coopted that flexibility to create a network egress that will bypass your scans, and might subtly prefill that with a malicious endpoint?

I want to say "and especially prevent them from touching my private data (i.e. the whole point of Obsidian plugins being to read/write the documents)".

But if it can't talk to the internet, I kind of don't see the issue.

EDIT: Apparently due to how JS and Electron works, Obsidian plugins are just JS blobs that run in the global scope, and can read/write the whole filesystem (limited by user permissions) and make HTTP requests? Can someone confirm/deny this pls?

I am curious how well this works out in practice for the ecosystem, though. In my experience blanket scans have a good chance to produce false-positives (= CVE exists but doesn't apply to the context it's used in), so the scans need some know-how to interpret correctly, which can lead to a lot of maintainer churn.

The permission system are definitely useful for hard limits - but AI review can surface way more detail (what kinds of things are actually sent over the network, etc).

All are necessary because permissions alone can't solve certain malicious behaviors. Look at some scorecards on the Community site you'll quickly see why some of the warnings are not things a permissions system or sandboxing could catch.

The blog post contains details about the rollout, but it will be a phased approach because it requires changes to the plugin API.

Security and authorization is just hard and at one point if you are designing a platform you have to ask yourself if it's worth the risk for the sake of flexibility. To plan for a perfectly safe system is a hopeless proposition.

The checks are a filter so they can apply manual review only to those plugins which pass the baseline (and automatable) requirements.

Sooo... don't use it?

There are plenty of open source alternatives, and I'm sure someone's going to mention org-mode.

Beautiful searching and editing experience and all the KM features that I need, all on plain Markdown. I’ve been extremely happy since I set it up.

As long as it's trusted, there is no lock-in, and the model supports maintaining the software, what do you have to lose?

I was a big todo.sh fan in college. Then wundrrlist and joplin. Still miss wunderlist. Tried Tiddlywiki too and liked it. You can make all of them work if it's just you. Sharing and collaboration is pain!

Then Notion. It is just perfect. Was very happy to pay for personal plan which is now removed. There is no official client for Linux (thanks Lotion). I was even using it to host my blog. Now downgraded to a free plan. Using wordpress for blogging.

Have tried obsidian and joplin as notion replacement but couldn't make it work. Notion mobile app is not very fast but better than any other options. I am so used to its databases, cross-linking, creating reminders.

Why not bring back the personal plan! It was really affordable.

For real-time collaboration, some options are:

- Relay

- Peerdraft

- Screen garden

(full disclosure - I am the developer of Relay)